Death in the Fog

Heavy fog lay on London, and from Lewisham to Hammersmith, scarcely a car moved. Buses inched along the streets and trains moved cautiously along their rights of way. The 5:18 from Charing Cross to Kent that evening ground to a stop just past St. John's station to wait its turn at Park's Bridge Junction, which Londoners call the "busiest strip of railway line in the world." The electric train's ten coaches were pack-jammed, with more than 1,000 passengers caught up in the confusion of the heaviest pea-souper in two years.

On the same track as the 5:18, just as crowded and already behind schedule, the steam-driven 4:56 from Cannon Street was headed out for Ramsgate and the channel coast. Overhead, on the viaduct that crosses the main lines on the southeastern edge of London, an electric local was inching forward. At precisely 6:20, in a moment of ghostly horror, the blanket of fog was lit by a blinding blue flash. St. John's grimy brick houses rocked to a crash that sounded, said one resident, "like the explosion of a ton of bombs." Plunging ahead in the fog, the steam train had plowed into the rear of the electric train, whipped around like a swung scythe, snapping a steel support of the viaduct. The 700-ton bridge crashed down on the crowded commuter trains beneath. The train overhead stopped just on the edge of disaster.

With a matter-of-factness bred of wartime blitz experience, trackside residents were on the job administering first aid before the first ambulances groped their way to the terrible scene. The injured and dying were given first aid in kitchens and parlors as families worked together through the night, trying to rescue victims, many of whom were irrevocably trapped in the twisted steel. In a public bath, rows of bodies were laid out under blankets; under one white sheet stood a bucket containing a head and three legs. Hour after hour, the casualties were totted up in hospitals and mortuaries. The final casualty list: 88 dead, no seriously injured in the third worst rail crash in Britain's history.*

* The other two: the collision of two passenger trains and a troop train at Quintinshill, near Gretna, Scotland, on May 22, 1915, which took the lives of 227; the triple collision of express and commuter trains at Harrow on Oct. 8, 1952 (TIME, Oct. 20, 1952), in which 112 were killed.

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